Vacation Tips: Rest Up

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“An act of desperation to get students struggling to read back on the right path has a teacher embracing a unique method at the forefront of deaf education in Canada.”

I received word sometime late last year that Hungry Bones was set to play at the amazing 8 Fest in January.

This particular festival only plays celluloid, or, basically, original master Super 8mm prints. This means that most of the time the audio is played on a separate sound system, like a CD-player or digital media player. In the projection booth they would have the track list and play the appropriate .wav file at the cue (usually just after the leader celluloid, right at the beginning of the actual film).

The problem was that I did not really know how to go about getting a proper length of audio… See, Super 8 cartridges are generally three minutes and twenty seconds, so when I originally created the audio portion for the film, I had timed out certain audio cues and sound effects to that time. Unfortunately, during the film processing stage, an unknown number of feet were removed from the beginning of the film. I never got an explanation as to why this happened from the processing lab, but it really screwed things up in my head. I know I had a longer shot at the beginning of the film; I had actually taken meticulous notes on how many seconds each shot was for the sole purpose of laying out an audio track that would align well with the visuals. See, when the film was first shown, it was shown without any post-production (no edits). I did not even get to see the film before it was screened, as that’s part of the rules of the One Take Super 8 Event… and I knew I wanted to make a soundtrack that felt like it was created with the beats of the film in mind.

So, with unknown timing to deal with, I came to a bit of a block. Frame rate also had to be considered. Was the film going to play at the traditional 18 frames per second? How accurate was the timing of the motor on their projector? This could affect how long the film ultimately plays.

I was pretty good about getting the physical film reel to them back in December, after it was scanned/transferred to 2K at Frame Discreet. The audio file, however, just seemed really daunting, and I only got it to them in the last week of January, even though the soundscape has been created for almost six months. I felt pretty bad about, since it just causes stress on their part, and they are the ones nice enough to present my work…

If you happen to be around Toronto on Saturday, January 31 at 9pm, check out the Cut Paste and Animate program. Here’s a description from TAIS:

For the8fest’s 2015 edition, the festival decided to echo its 2012 programme Adventures in Animationland. Cut Paste Animate focuses on animation and collage ─ bringing life to still images, playing with what can only be represented by abstracting shapes and bodies or using hands and eyes to explore tensions between what is static and what must be kinetic. In addition to works received as submissions, the8fest has commissioned new animated works by visual artists already conversant with film and visual artists whose bodies of work have seriously implied sequences of moving pictures.

Check this out! The Vancouver Island Short Film Festival is awesome and has selected George Bassler’s Perpetual Motion Machine to screen in February, 2015 in Nanaimo, BC! They released the poster on the right (click for a larger image) and radio ads.

As it so happens, I had already booked a trip to Vancouver Island and will be in the area just three days too late. I am hoping to meet up with some of the film community on the island if they aren’t too burnt out from the festival.

I am pretty stoked to be showing in a new country. It is the first time in a long time that I have screened anything even outside of Canada, so to be screening Hungry Bones at the dresdner schmalfilmtage film festival in Germany, I am both honoured and curious. German cinema has a looong, amazing history, so I am very interested to hear how the audience responds to the film. This film even pays a bit of homage to some of the early, surreal storytelling found in Germany.

For this particular screening, I have added German subtitles, graciously translated by Nicole Gfeller, an artist and friend of Co-Director Chrystene Ells. I really like the look of celluloid and subtitles.

Below is a pretty cool trailer for the festival. I do not see any frames from Hungry Bones in there, but perhaps these are made ahead of time and we’ll see some memory of it in next year’s trailer.

She got me thinking about that old VHS camera. My memory of it is that it was huge and not very comfortable or ergonomic. I figured there might be a photograph lying around in some box with me and that camera. Sure enough, (thanks dad for preemptively scanning it!), seen below on the left is me with camera almost two decades apart from the photo on the right. This isn’t exactly when I first started uses that VHS camera, as there are videos I made with it from 5 years previous, but no photographs. Very fond memories.

Looking at the two photos, I had two thoughts.
1] The modern camera is equally as bulky.
and
2] I should consider starting up a service where I offer camera manufacturers a photograph with me and their camera. Could be fun.

This particular challenge was to use vacation footage, so I rummaged through some Super 8mm footage I had take on my travels. After selecting about ten minutes worth of pretty interesting shots, I came up with a running theme, something to the affect of ‘tips’ as a through-line or frame for the footage to be used in. The challenge is meant to be done in just a few hours, and I had already exceeded that, so I settled on just doing one tip for now. The hope is to some day come back and do the other four tips I had done a rough cut on. We’ll see if I can rise to that challenge as well…

I did not know the the performance was being recorded and had actually forgotten about it when Ingrid contacted me, letting me know she had uploaded it to YouTube. What a treat! This was performed live in Calgary at IFAO’s Dolly Wiggler Cabaret starring Phillip Huber.

For this particular film, we decided to do the narration first and shoot around the timing of the story. It was definitely interesting working this way, as usually sound comes during or after production, but I think it made it easier to do the in-camera editing.